Spring 2000, Volume 17.3

Essay

Levi S. Peterson

Growing Up in Snowflake

Levi S. Peterson is a professor of English at Weber State University. He is
the author of two collections of short stories, The Canyons of Grace and Night
Soil; two
novels, The Backslider and Aspen Marooney, and a biography, Juanita Brooks: Mormon Woman
Historian.

Snowflake is a small town in northern Arizona. I delivered newspapers there from age
eleven to fifteen, at first by horse, later by bicycle. Consequently I can remember all
the houses in town and most of their occupants. In one of its aspects, the town was a
culture, which it passed on to me. In descending order, this culture was Occidental,
American, Western, and Mormon. Well before my time, the town's agrarian economy had
reached its saturation point and its children had to emigrate. Its links to other
communities were such that it prepared its children for a very different mode of living
than they had experienced in it. As a community, Snowflake prepared me for city life. As a
place, small and remote, it left me with a taste for the wild.

My father's name was Joseph Peterson. Raised in Utah, he was called to Snowflake in
1898 to establish a high school curriculum at the stake academy. He had four sons and two
daughters by his first wife, Amanda Andelin, who died of typhoid in 1919. My mother's name
was Lydia Jane Savage. She had two daughters by her first husband, Jesse N. Smith III,
called N.J., whom my mother divorced in 1916 because she considered him a ne'er-do-well.
My father and mother married in 1924, composing an instant family from his two sons and
one daughter who remained at home and her two daughters. They went on to have five sons,
of whom I am the last. The first of these five, Alma, died in early childhood.

My mother had long arms, wide hips, a prominent nose, a jutting chin, and auburn hair
that didn't go gray in old age. She had no capacity for play but worked prodigiously and
got by with very little sleep. She rose early, built the fires, cooked all the meals,
washed clothes on Monday, baked bread on Saturday, pressed my father's suits, and mended
her son's overalls. Often her household included grandchildren, orphaned nephews and
nieces, and her aged, senile mother. Working alone in the kitchen late at night, my mother
talked to herself aloud in a voice that was earnest, well inflected, and full of query and
response. I never regarded this habit as eccentric because she practiced it from my
earliest memory. She also slept in church. Within a minute or two of taking her seat on a
church bench, she was gone, and it was the duty of anyone sitting next to her to awaken
her for partaking of the Sacrament.

I hasten to say that much of the civilizing I have undergone along the line of
affection, loyalty, and interest in my fellow human beings I owe to my mother. Over and
over she communicated an unconditional love for me during my formative years, infusing me
with a propensity to affirm and take pleasure in human beings rather than to injure or
begrudge them, a contribution to my adult personality very worth having.

My father was almost sixty when I was born, and he died when I was nine. He had
abundant silvery hair, and his manners were dignified and somehow sedate even when he
labored on our small farm. Every morning while school was in session, he walked to the
nearby high school attired in suit, white shirt, and tie. Everyone called him Professor
Peterson with the profoundest respect. He was also a counselor in the stake presidency,
which meant that, when attending Snowflake ward, he sat in an honored seat on the stand,
where, irresistibly, he fell asleep.

One day as my father and I arrived home in the car, he asked me to open the gate to the
driveway, which I did with some difficulty, being perhaps four years old. As the car
rolled past me, he said, "Thank you." I also said, "Thank you."
"No," he said gently, "you say, `You are welcome.'" Thus I learned how
to be gracious to those who have thanked me. How many hundreds of other things did I learn
from him without remembering my debt?

My father's children by Amanda were Arley, Leora, Andelin, Earland, Elwood, and Wanda.
My mother's children by N.J. were Lenora and Mary. These, my half-siblings, were married
before or soon after my birth. They seemed more like uncles and aunts than brothers and
sisters. Their children, on the other hand, were very much my equals, and I acquired an
affection for all of them almost as deep and abiding as my affection for the three
immediate brothers with whom I grew up. My adult siblings moved around the West a good
deal, but at any given time some of them lived in Snowflake or nearby towns. Visits from
those who lived far away were happy, festive occasions, and their inevitable conclusions
taught me that life is characterized by happy assemblies and sad departures.

My immediate brothers, Charles, Roald, and Leon, also contributed to my socialization,
for they were my influential peers, and it is the role of peers to teach one another that
what happens to one must sooner or later happen to all. However, our surrender to the
conventions of adulthood was reluctant and late. My brothers and I lived in inescapable
intimacy. During my earliest childhood, we shared two beds in a single room. Later, an
outside wash house was finished, and Charles and Roald slept there. Each of us had a small
closet and a single drawer in a dresser for clothes. These could not be locked. We ate at
the same table three times a day, vied for a single bathroom, and did outside chores
together. In winter we were thrust even more closely upon one another. Our house was
heated by wood-burning stoves, and we normally had fires only in the dining room and
kitchen.

The boys of Snowflake created a counter-culture whereby they collectively resisted the
domestications of adult society. My brothers and I were members in good standing in this
piratical fraternity. We had a conscience, knew right from wrong, and cheerfully sought
the wrong. Returning from movies after dark, we wrote our names with urine in the dust of
the graveled street. If one of us broke wind, we followed a frantic ritual. If the one who
had broken wind shouted "Safety!" before someone else could shout
"Jiggers!" all was well with him. But if someone else shouted
"Jiggers!" first, all present were commissioned to pinch the wrong doer while he
counted from ten backward, whistled, and shouted "Bulljo!"

When insulting our enemies with a birdie, we did not merely offer an elevated middle
finger but pulled down the finger on either side to resemble testicles below an erect
penis. It took muscular conditioning to get one's side fingers to take this position
quickly, important because in offering insults, timing is everything. So under the
tutelage of my brothers, I practiced for weeks one summer to perfect my ability. I am
pleased to report that this skill, once acquired, never departs. From my brothers I also
learned how to use obscene words, smoke bark-and-paper cigarettes, and masturbate a male
dog.

When I was five or six, I got undressed behind a chicken coop with a girl my own age. I
was very interested in her genitalia, as she was with mine. One of my brothers discovered
us and threatened to tell on us unless we did what married people do. I do not recall the
result of our attempt, but after that I knew where babies came from.

I loved play and hated work when I was a child. An hour of play passed in a wink. An
hour of work drudged on forever. My emotions were unbearably vivid. I can't duplicate
their intensity now. I just remember that anticipation and disappointment were
overwhelming uncontrolled freshets of emotion, floods rather than streams. I took
pleasure in remote and arcane resemblances. Even a faint similarity could trigger my
imagination, inducing me to step from actuality into fantasy. One Friday after school I
made a farm tractor of my coaster wagon by placing a cardboard box in the front half of
its bed. Our lot was on a hill, which I coasted down, seated behind the box like a farmer
behind the engine of a tractor. With a pencil I drew a radiator grill on the front of the
box and on the back I drew oil and temperature gauges. I stuck twigs through the back of
the box to represent a throttle and choke, which I pulled and pushed just as I had seen
drivers of tractors do.

I first attended church in the arms of my mother, then sat at her side in sacrament
meeting. Soon I attended Junior Sunday School and Primary. I understood very early that
Mormons who attended church were good people and outsiders and Jack Mormons were bad
people, some of them notoriously so. I hated sermons from my earliest consciousness. The
lay preachers of Snowflake ward relished doctrine and high sounding phrase, and many a
good farmer, called on to open or close a meeting, turned his prayer into a lengthy
disquisition on the gospel. My mother was mercifully narcotized during all this by sleep.
Unluckily I lacked the ability to sleep in church in those days. For distraction, I made
dolls from a handkerchief, drew pictures on bits of paper, and counted dots on the high
ceiling. Long before meeting ended, I languished in unrelieved misery.

Still, Sunday had its redeeming traits. Sunday dinner was the best of the week, with
fried chicken or roast beef, mashed potatoes, gravy made with cream, buttered vegetables,
and pie with a tender, flaky crust or cake with deep rich chocolate icing. When sacrament
meeting adjourned in the late afternoon, I was free to seek friends, and we played raucous
games in the street or backyard. Sadly, modern Mormon children are not permitted vigorous
activity on the Sabbath. God, it seems, dislikes energetic movement on his Holy Day.

The church also accounted for much of the social life of the town. It sponsored Friday
or Saturday night dances, especially in the summer when school was out, and organized the
observance of holidays. Children often attended adult dances, and some of the older men
practiced the pioneer custom of dancing with teenage girls. On the fourth of July the town
fathers fired a charge of dynamite at dawn. A patriotic program, street games, and dance
followed through the course of the day. Pioneer Day on the twenty-fourth of July was an
even bigger event, featuring a parade, a grand barbecue, and a two-day rodeo with boxing
matches and evening dances. On Thanksgiving night there was a Wood Dance, to which men and
boys earned their admission by hauling, sawing, and splitting a winter's supply of juniper
for the town's widows and spinsters.

At the rodeos, I escaped from the car and circled the arena afoot, excited by all the
commotion. A loud speaker blared "The Yellow Rose of Texas" or "Blue
Shadows on the Trail." I peered into pens where broncs stood with heads drooping in
deceitful ease. I passed a camp of Apaches from the White Mountain reservation who had
arrived in a half-dozen horse-drawn wagons. I viewed a cavalcade of dudes, sun-burned
Jewish youths from the East who summered at a nearby guest ranch operated by Mormon
ranchers. I watched the calf roping, the team tying, the bull dogging, the horse racing.
The contestants were from Snowflake and nearby towns. Some were skilled, some inept. That
made no difference to me. Amidst rising dust and bawling critters, I was amazed, excited,
electrified.

It was the church that made this possible. The bishop appointed a Pioneer Day committee
and called on others to help out in putting on the parade, program, barbecue, rodeos,
boxing matches, and dances. If I were looking for a new church, I'd find one that puts on
rodeos. A church that puts on rodeos has a lot going for it.

The church also instructed me in Christian mythology, giving me a metaphysics and world
view as well as a mode of worship. Despite my aversion to sermons, the church managed to
teach me a good deal of doctrine and theology. Some of my early catechists were duly
appointed by the churchmy primary teacher, my Sunday school teacher, and later, when
I had turned twelve and been ordained a deacon, my priesthood meeting instructor. My
instructors in priesthood meeting were always men. Most of my other teachers were women.
They were invariably better prepared and more impressive than the men.

I also received a lot of informal instruction. My brothers were adept at translating
adult language into juvenile concepts. For example, Roald informed me that God could see
through concrete. Though I doubted Roald at first, I later adopted his view. One night a
town loafer declared that, according to an apostle preaching in the latest general
conference, the Second Coming would occur within the decade. "You boys better get
your house in order in a hurry," the loafer said. Because of this, I suffered anxiety
for several years over the fast approach of the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord. This
loafer was an agent of the church, albeit self appointed. As an institution of religious
instruction, the church isn't limited to those who occupy pulpits or who sign certificates
of baptism and ordination. It includes anyone who fancies himself or herself an authority.

Following is a confession of my faith during my early teens, the credo of a Christian
child from Snowflake.

I believed God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost were distinct personal
and corporeal entities. I believed my Heavenly Father had a spouse, my Heavenly Mother,
and they were the parents of my spirit in the Pre-Existence. I believed the Pre-Existence
still thronged with unborn spirits waiting to enter the mortal body of a newly conceived
child. I believed that human couples who persevered in righteousness were destined to
become celestial parents of spirits and creators of worlds in the manner of our Heavenly
Father and Mother. I believed the Bible and the Book of Mormon were the word of God,
equally tedious and incomprehensible. I believed Joseph Smith had been a true prophet of
God and that the existing president of the church, Heber J. Grant, was his successor. I
believed that faithful prayer could move mountains and heal the sick, though I had never
witnessed an actual miracle. I believed it wicked to drink, smoke, swear, masturbate, or
peer into the blouse of a nubile girl sitting in the desk next to mine at school.
Predictably, in certain moods I believed myself damned. In more congenial moods, I fancied
I stood in good odor with God. The key to winning God's grace was self denial. I believed
in self denial. I simply wasn't very good at achieving it.

I have lived most of my adult life in cities, all of which have oppressed me with their
congestion and nearly total obliteration of the natural. I trace my dislike for cities to
Snowflake, which left me with an irrepressible appetite for the wild.

In any season I was aware of the sky. The sun was bright year around, even in winter.
The rise of a full moon over the low eastern horizon was always spectacular. The harvest
moon was unbelievably largemaybe ten miles away. During the dark of the moon, I saw
a stunning sky. Stars glimmered and the Milky Way painted the zenith a chalky white.
Everywhere the cosmos burned with a fine luminescent dust.

Winters were sunny but cold. Sometimes winter temperatures plunged drastically with an
accession of arctic air over the open plains of northern Arizona. We heated our house with
juniper; no wood has a more fragrant smoke than juniper and I miss it sorely. Our
ill-framed house leaked heat steadily, and we stayed close to a stove. Children who live
with central heating don't know what winter is. We slept between flannel sheets and under
a heavy stack of quilts. On the coldest nights our mother wrapped heated flat irons in
towels and placed them at our feet.

Snow was infrequent but not unknown. When it fell, the entire town was happy. The
general aridity of the region was a fact no one could ignore; precipitation in any amount
and at any season was cause for rejoicing. One Sunday when I was the first awake in our
house, I went out the back door and found the world covered by an astonishing mantle of
snow, perhaps six inches deep and utterly unblemished. In retrospect I recognize that the
snow had stopped falling only minutes before I discovered it. Overhead a muted light
passed through low clouds, and I was transfixed by the unfamiliar scene, intuiting alien
realities upon which I had no rational grasp. The snow softened angles and filled corners
and crevices. It clung to branches, creating lacy patterns. It buried the woodpile,
covered buckets, boxes, pens, and coops, and stretched in a heaping line along the fence
railing. It transformed the street and spread across the vacant block next to ours. By
noon, when we returned from Sunday school, it had melted. It had been a passing
revelation. I had been visited by the wild and warned it is not always with us.

Spring visited us briefly in February. Temperatures ameliorated and suddenly there were
a few balmy days. Along the creek were pussy willows with silvery gray catkins, and I
experienced a minor ecstasy upon finding them. The most notable feature of springtime was
the wind. From early March through most of June a gale raced northeastward across northern
Arizona. It could blow day and night for weeks at a time, and if it stopped for a few
blessed days, nothing was more certain than that it would soon begin again. The pioneers
of the region cursed the wind, and some of them turned around and went back to their
previous habitat because of it.

In full summer, calm, hot days became the rule. Evenings were balmy, and by morning a
cool freshness prevailed. Invariably we pulled up the covers well before dawn. During the
rainy season of July and August, thunderheads boiled upward in silvery white billows every
afternoon. Often they gathered into a storm, which advanced across the land with lightning
and thunder and veils of rain. Storms developed mostly on the hottest days, and those
lucky enough to be in their wake were blessed with a happy amelioration of the
temperature.

One afternoon I stood in our yard and watched a sharply defined wall of rain advance
toward me. I ran to the shelter of the front porch as the drenching downpour arrived. Half
the sky was clear and sun rays slanted in from the west to where I stood. Minutes later
the rain was gone, and a rainbow cast its curving spectrum among broken clouds in the
eastern sky.

Silver Creek divided our farm and gave it much of its pleasant character. Near the
bottom of our land the creek was deflected slightly by a rock wall, where a headgate
diverted water into a ditch. Periodic floods dredged a swimming hole at the base of the
rock wall. On hot afternoons, naked boys with flying penises ran full tilt down a sand bar
and plunged into the pool. Poison ivy grew on the opposite side of the rock wall. I was
warned not to touch it and never did. It grew uninvited, beautifully green and shiny, yet
a sign of the unfriendly side of the wild.

The creek and its banks were a rich riparian environment. Willows, cottonwoods, grass,
reeds, wild roses, and any number of other plants grew plentifully. Red-winged blackbirds
and meadow larks and a host of birds I never learned to identify warbled among the
branches. Imported carp and native suckers swam in the creek. Ducks paddled on its quiet
surface. Blue herons waded along sand bars with bright-eyed aplomb, prepared to harvest an
unsuspecting frog. Raccoon and skunk tracks were abundant along the banks. Once in a while
a coyote or a bobcat made a crossing and left its tracks behind.

I often had the duty of escorting a cow in heat to a nearby farmer's bull. One eager
cow didn't wait till I had opened a gate but tried to go through a barbed wire fence,
where she stopped, half in and half out. While the amorous bull lowed gently at her head,
I shoved mightily at her rear till I had pushed her through the fence. We milked as many
as a half dozen cows and sold raw milk to our neighbors. As for the hygienic qualities of
our milk, I recall plucking many a mote of dry cow manure from a foaming pail with a
none-too-clean finger. In general, our cows tolerated my presence and seemed even to take
an altruistic interest in my welfare. On more than one occasion, I fell to the ground and
writhed in mock agony, and four or five of the cows gathered around me, mooing anxiously
and wanting to help.

I think of our cows as long-departed friends whose names I remember fondly: Pet,
Pippin, Sally, Jerse, Blackie, Flossie, and so on. It was a pleasure to hear them belch
and watch a lump rise up their long throats and see their jaws begin to chew a cud. Cud
chewing, an eons-old habit of the ruminants, reminds me that my friends the cows were more
wild than tame. Like me, they wore their domestication lightly.

Early autumn in Snowflake was a benign season. Frost began to appear in the mornings,
and fields turned silver with stubble. The trees of town and along the lanes and creek
took on hues of yellow and red, and the atmosphere seemed extraordinarily rarified and
pure.

My happiest autumn in Snowflake was my last. I was a junior in high school. By a quirk
of unforeseen circumstances, I would spend my senior year of high school in Mesa, a small
city, and after that I would go away to college in Provo, another small city. I will say
in advance that even small cities were too much for me. Their paved curbs and sidewalks,
their dense array of houses, their swarms of people forced the domesticated oppressively
to the forefront of my consciousness. I could no longer feel the wild.

But in 1949, at the beginning of my junior year, I had no inkling of this unhappy
eventuality. Allowed to leave school early every afternoon, I hauled hay, cut corn,
assisted in the production of silage, got in winter's wood from the hills, and did all the
outside chores at our lot in town. I did a lot of hunting that fall. I parked our pickup
among the junipers out on the range land and hunted along ledges of rock with my .22 rifle
and shot a cottontail or two. More than once I got home after dark and gutted a rabbit by
light coming from the window, and later, when I came in from milking, my mother was frying
the rabbit for supper.

One day I saw a herd of antelope, maybe twenty of them, in a wide grassy valley rimmed
by junipers. The tawny-and-white pronghorns wheeled and began an easy lope down the valley
toward a barbed wire fence. I watched with excitement, anticipating that, one after
another, they would gracefully leap the fence with scarcely a break in their stride. I was
shocked when they skidded to a halt and, three or four at a time, fell to their knees and
crawled under the fence. On the other side, they resumed their flight, and after a minute
or two they passed from sight over the far rim of the valley. So I was taught, if I hadn't
already learned this lesson, that the wild can deceive you. It can announce, quite
abruptly, that it has plans beyond human expectations.

One night in mid-October I was milking cows after nightfall at the farm. I was at the
flank of a cow, stripping hard on her teats. A bright moon stood high in the sky. I heard
a distant sound, which quickly magnified into the quacking of ducks. Suddenly I saw two
ducks pass between me and the moon, rocketing on with plaintive voices toward an invisible
haven on the nearby creek. My emotions were intense and complex. I was suspended in
delight, rich anticipation, and the ineffable mystery of being alive. I was at one with
the staccato flight of the ducks, the glowing moon, and the frosty October shadows around
me.

It was good to grow up in Snowflake. I had a full sense of belonging to family, church,
and school. I took on my acculturation with considerable pleasure or, where pleasure
lacked, at least with tolerance and resignation. Furthermore, I enjoyed the wild and took
its active presence as a matter of course. As a city-dwelling adult, I have become all too
keenly aware of the well established law that the beautiful side of the wild recedes to
the degree that civilization develops. But as a child I had no idea that culture is
ultimately antithetical to wilderness. My home town, small and comprehensible, seemed a
sufficient shelter against the ominous lethal side of the wild. In my perceptions the
beautiful side of the wild and the domesticated mingled harmoniously. I had from that a
wholeness of spirit sadly lacking in my adult personality.